May 2017

What IS Derailed?? We are about to start the next stage of development for our latest show Derailed and we want to share our process with you.

*Please note that there are a few spoiler alerts.

Interview by Andrea Holland

What was your main inspiration for developing “Derailed”?

Patricia:Creativity comes from the most random places. Sometimes you start with an idea, in this case, it was the derailment of the train in Santiago (2013). Then, when you verbalize that idea, you actually realise there might be other things that are more appealing, more attractive and more engaging. Then you ‘derail’ (excuse the pun) into different ideas. That was the starting point, then the better idea comes through which was inspired by that initial idea and so on.

Merce:So in our case the starting point was the accident. And and then we started asking ourselves: who was responsible? Was it just the driver? Was it the government for not putting safety measures in place? And it got us thinking, OK, this isn’t as simple, this has got more to it than we anticipated. It’s about citizens, the government and their relationship. Then conversations about activism arose, about how can we, as individuals, hold our governments accountable. And do WE actually have enough power? What are our tools for doing that? And we started to look at our own lives to share our hopes, desires and feelings about a better world.

Why did you choose to make it autobiographical?

Merce:Because we wanted to talk about a really big topic “changing the world”. And the only way you can really tackle this is by going into detail, by looking around you, thinking how am I, in a world of millions, contributing to making it better? And, can my little actions have such an effect that they will eventually work towards positive change?

Patricia:Also because we like to think of making it engaging, attractive for the audience. And after many hours of talking about it and improvising on it, our final conclusion for this particular process was that actually our own stories were the most exciting to tackle the topic. We can talk of activism better from our own experiences, if not, it becomes too broad, too distant.

Merce: there is someone that at some point becomes big and relevant and people follow them. But the real changes have to be powered by normal people in order to succeed.…